Strewth- a totally different point of view

It is my opinion only, for what that is worth, that AOC is likely to take on Trump in 2028, if we still have elections by then.

She is the antidote to Trump's brand of division. Her outspokenness and pushing back has to happen in order to bring issue to light. She is exactly what the dems need to court blue collar workers and get those voters back to the Dems.

Jasmine Crockett, Cory Booker, AOC. These will be the people who can best fight Trump. If the old Democrats get out of the way and let them.

There are plenty of future Democratic leaders emerging in Congress, but they are being shut down by old school Dems.

What will be interesting to watch is how many conservatives jump ship. Remember after the 1930 tariffs, the entire country went left and conservatives lost over 130 seats in Congress.

Bankrupt people tend to care less about political parties when they can't feed their children.

Many, including posters on this site, have tried their best to hide/bury/move on/deceive on this issue.
But it hasnt worked.

^^The Democrats lost the election because Jo Biden was the best man for the job and that tells you all. They simply have no one with charisma, presence or intelligence enough to counter Trump. Trump did not win the election, the Democrats lost it.
^

I do think immigration is a big issue too.
And getting bigger.
Even bigger than most even realise.
In many Countries.

In very affluent Countries it may not be as big an issue.
I am not sure I any longer count Uk as affluent[yes I know it prob is in top 10 of the world]. Or the US. from what seems to be emerging from "ordinary" Americans.

I think as with the move to the right in the UK and other European countries, people are looking around them and seeing the rich get richer and richer while the poor keep getting poorer. They see towns with no manufacturing and no jobs, children with no futures and they look for someone to blame, so they blame the, generally, liberal/left leaning political parties under which much of this has happened.

In fact globalisation came out of the rightwing politics of Mrs Thatcher and President Regan, but the more leftward leaning governments that followed, and that includes the USA followed through in the misguided belief in openess and internationalism, which they confused with the globalising market economics of the right. Remember Peter Mandelson sayng he was: intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes. Well, of course they never do. Since the damage done to people's lives happened when centre/left parties were in power, those suffering, have two choices, go right or go extreme left. A choice between a rock and a hard place. Most have chosen to move to the right - and that includes in the US.

The Democrats lost the election because Jo Biden was the best man for the job and that tells you all. They simply have no one with charisma, presence or intelligence enough to counter Trump. Trump did not win the election, the Democrats lost it.

He promised to sort everything out, get America back to work, given how weak the alternative was, it is not surprising people voted for him, even intelligent educated people. In a 2 party state he was the only alternative to more of the same under Biden/Harris.

Perhaps Trump is the antidote to Mrs Thatcher, he is the one coming in from the cold and throwing all the toys out of the pram and starting again

"It's worth remembering how long it took Nixon to be voted into the White House" - really? Maybe for his first term, but I was there in 1972 and he won every state except Massachusetts. The Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up was round that time.

Our First Past The Post system makes it difficult to vote according to your conscience or, often to see a vote for the candidate of your choice as having any value. A lot of the time we feel more strongly which party we DON'T want in power than which candidate we'd like to represent us.

The fairest system is Single Transferable Vote, and we had a chance to use it, in a referendum when we had the lib-lab coalition, but the big parties don't like it and campaigned relentlessly to squash it, saying it was too complicated (it really, really isn't!) and lying that it would mean people supporting small parties "got to vote again and again". You only vote once, in order of preference, the count does all the rest.

It helps avoid those situations where the vote is, say, 40/30/30 and both the 30s desperately did NOT want the eventual winner; and it helps parties like the greens to at least "stand up and be counted" by coming second or third in a big race and increasing their chance of winning next time.

But, as I said, the big parties felt threatened by this method and the country appeared more polarised than it actually is.

The American method is strange, because election of a president is by candidate and not by party, so although the senate and the house often both fall in line with the winner's party at the general election, that president can be hobbled by losing both houses two years later at the mid-terms (which almost certainly will happen if Trump carries on the way he is right now)

dragonfly46

We were in the US at the time of Watergate and mixed with some very intelligent high-flying Republicans who were convinced that Nixon was innocent.

That's understandable in some ways, the President was a figurehead and people don't like to think that he is corrupt, especially if they voted for him. However it's worth remembering how long it took Nixon to be voted into the White House and there was clearly a reason for this.
Like many others I can't understand what made people vote for Trump, especially after the dubious things that happened during his last term, and most of all after the violence and rioting in Washington when he lost the election.
People I've spoken to tend to put it down to the fact that the Republicans had no other viable candidate, and once you've voted for someone you don't like to admit it was a mistake.

undines

How, exactly, does one check THE FACTS? For the vast majority of news, we only have our chosen media outlet to go by. I think it behoves us all to question, question and question again. As for that wretched term 'far right' - anyone would think a goodly proportion of our country was akin to Ghengis Khan. Time we stopped labelling, stopped believing (often what we want to believe) and started trying to understand

I think most of us use worldwide media undines, we don’t rely on UK based only sources, if you check out legitimate news sites across the spectrum you get as near to the facts as you are able to?

How, exactly, does one check THE FACTS? For the vast majority of news, we only have our chosen media outlet to go by. I think it behoves us all to question, question and question again. As for that wretched term 'far right' - anyone would think a goodly proportion of our country was akin to Ghengis Khan. Time we stopped labelling, stopped believing (often what we want to believe) and started trying to understand

Speaking of health care in the US. He is promising tariffs on our medications now. Which we already can barely afford. This will mean more people going without.

I would think that a President who cares about the people would make access to medical care and prescriptions more accessible, not less.

www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2025-04-08/trump-says-us-will-soon-announce-tariffs-on-pharmaceutical-imports

We need to discriminate between Trump's actual actions and all the trash-talking that goes with them.

* a Man with NO …

nanna8

We were just sat with a couple of American medical doctors who were avid Trump supporters. They didn’t understand why there is so much opposition to him in the rest of the world. They said he had got rid of a lot of people who did no work but got paid for their services in government circles and that they had witnessed all the waste within government health services and other departments themselves ( didn’t know they had any to be honest, thought it was all private health there). It was interesting to hear that they thought he would save America. They also said the Ukraine is one of the most corrupt regimes in the world (!!) involved with many worldwide illegal trading including that of young girls . Who to believe? They were clearly sensible high achievers. I said Trump may be good for the US but a disaster for everyone else. They didn’t like that at all.

Currently I’m just watching all the chaos unfold. I’m pretty sure Trump never does ANY actual work on ‘his’ policies. He has, as everyone says: been fixated on Tariffs as a ‘cure-all’ for decades. His minions do all the actual working out, whilst he golfs, etc, then he produces the policies others have worked on that he agrees with! As someone said earlier he’s a reality show con man pretending to be a President! He wants two things Power and money for HIMSELF. As for these two Medics being intelligent… Elon Musk is perhaps a near genius in all things engineering, etc, but his emotional intelligence is near nil! During the pandemic there was a group of 800 doctors led by Dr Simone Gold who were all good as doctors but all swore blind that vaccines were poison and you could use the veterinary invermectin to cure Covid, and other wacky ideas!
Simone Gold was arrested in the Jan 6 th riots! Intelligence is many things. Your doctors may have done all their exams and be bright in many ways, but that doesn’t equate to being intelligent in everything! I am hoping that the wholesale mess Trump has made of Tariffs and the slash and burn of the government rather than a careful surgical erasure of ‘waste, fraud & abuse’ will gradually lift the blinkers from at least some of Trumps followers. But I think that unlikely UNTIL IT AFFECTS THEM NEGATIVELY & PERSONALLY ! Then they might start to see what a fraud HE IS. Not to mention Amanda with no character, empathy or morals. The Tafiff maths are badly flawed… proven… Will he apologise? No… the best he might do is blame someone else. Never himself!

SaxonGrace

I couldn’t have put it better myself, I’m not a Trump supporter however my thinking now is that he needs to be given a chance, the last incumbent I found rather scary, my instinct tells me he wants the best for his country, I love his support for Israel too.

So you support the fact that he is participating in illegal and unconstitutional actions, is currently bankrupting many Americans and has engaged in human rights violations of asylum seekers?

I ask, what type of chance would you give a PM that acted like this?

Not that it makes it any better Cateq, But that practice is not just for foreigners. That is standard practice for all patients. this is how they rake in the dough from big insurance amd why most Americans go bankrupt during medical issues.

Obama tried to level the field with the ACA, but Trump managed to gut it during his first term. There is talk that he will do away with it all together in his second, removing all protections for Americans.

With regards to American health care I know for a fact the hospitals regularly overcharge any foreign patients. I’ve seen itemised invoices sent to my previous employer’s travel insurance claims team that billed us for a full box of latex gloves even though they only used 1 glove, likewise tried to charge for full packs of medication even though our customer only received one or two doses. We regularly had to negotiate the price down to what was actually used. Therefore if one of our customers paid the hospital direct they were ripped off. That sounds like corruption to me, the saying people in glass houses should throw stones comes to mind when reading some of comments here.

love0c

We are in trouble in this country and will be in even bigger trouble as the years pass. Why? Because in this country you are 'educated to be told what to think, rather than how to think'.

I would also like to know why you hold this opinion. Who is telling you what to think love0c ? Is it the same source that allows you to post what you want to say?

Norah

Allira

escaped that reminded me of a post-referendum party we went to. 🙂

I have seen comments from several posters that FriedGreenTomatoes2 is always polite despite having differing views from the majority on here and I will agree with that, even though I may disagree with her too.

I agree. FGT2 is always polite and kind.

I disagree with some of her political posts, but I disagree with many things.

Oh well.

Except of you are a foreigner or refugee. Not so nice and kind then.

love0c

We are in trouble in this country and will be in even bigger trouble as the years pass. Why? Because in this country you are 'educated to be told what to think, rather than how to think'.

Since when and what evidence to you have to support your claim?

All people I meet of all ages have immensely different view on everything from believing every conspiracy theory to thinking Jeremy Corbyn is a God. Royalists and rabid antiRoyalists.

There is far more variety of thought now and people are far more willing to say what they think than I can ever remember from my childhood.

I really would like to know on what you base your conclusions or do you just mean people do not agree with you.

love0c

We are in trouble in this country and will be in even bigger trouble as the years pass. Why? Because in this country you are 'educated to be told what to think, rather than how to think'.

What a strange opinion, in my opinion.
Maybe you could give some concrete and logical examples to support your statement.

Are you speaking for yourself love0c? I don’t know anybody who has been educated to be told what they think in this country, everybody exercises their free will in questioning history, politics, and the status quo, and have never been stopped from doing so.

We are in trouble in this country and will be in even bigger trouble as the years pass. Why? Because in this country you are 'educated to be told what to think, rather than how to think'.

I couldn’t have put it better myself, I’m not a Trump supporter however my thinking now is that he needs to be given a chance, the last incumbent I found rather scary, my instinct tells me he wants the best for his country, I love his support for Israel too.

nanna8

We were just sat with a couple of American medical doctors who were avid Trump supporters. They didn’t understand why there is so much opposition to him in the rest of the world. They said he had got rid of a lot of people who did no work but got paid for their services in government circles and that they had witnessed all the waste within government health services and other departments themselves ( didn’t know they had any to be honest, thought it was all private health there). It was interesting to hear that they thought he would save America. They also said the Ukraine is one of the most corrupt regimes in the world (!!) involved with many worldwide illegal trading including that of young girls . Who to believe? They were clearly sensible high achievers. I said Trump may be good for the US but a disaster for everyone else. They didn’t like that at all.

Even "high achievers" in the States struggle with free thinking and reflection. They may well be highly trained to do their job, they're not trained to research different perspectives.

Trade has been global for at least the last 5,000 years. But in the past the cost and difficulties of transport meant that individual countries could have a varied well balanced home industrial sector, while benefiting from the advantages of trade.

Nowadays transport is cheap and easy and home industries no longer have the protection high transport costs provide.

When Stalin was undertaking the reorganisation of Russian agriculture he made every republic within the union completely destroy its existing farming system in order to grow one or two allocated crops. Ukraine, for example to this day has two main crpes - wheat and sunflowers. Uzbekistan grows almost entirely cotton.

By doing this Stalin ensured that it was very difficult for any republic to try to go independent, because its agriculture was a monoculture, it would take years before it could begin to feed its people without importing much of their food from other republics.

We are in danger of doing this now to individual countries. Were China to decide to no longer supply the world as whole or even individual countries with electronic parts and devices that country would grind to a halt, because they cannot get them from anywhere else.

I am not arguing for a protectionism, but there is a happy medium between unfettered free trade, which despite being under the supervision of the World Trade organisation (WTO), is effectively what we have now, big boys do well, small boys do not, but i do think there needs to be a far more nuanced attitude.